Monthly Archives: June 2010

I don’t know exactly how to describe these so I shan’t try too hard and will just call them some fancy nestie and brad things. They’re all .pngs. Right click to save them to your machine and have fun using them.

This is my first whole layout give away. It’s called Pia Dora which is Spanish for ‘Gift from God’ and has lots of sketchy elements that I either hand-drew and scanned in or created from scratch in Illustrator and brought into Photoshop.

The lovely font is called Jellyka Antique Bees – see more lovely stuff from Jellyka on Deviant Art.

Just like the weather here in beautiful Ireland, the colours are warm and summery. It includes a knock out layer – all you need to do is insert a picture on a new layer at the bottom of the layer stack. This will show through the circular frame.

I fancied having some jewels on a layout I am working on and wrote up my technique for anyone who might be interested. It’s fairly quick and just ten steps long. There are lots of possibilities depending on your imagination.

I was inspired to decorate a letterform after seeing some beautiful designs on the web somewhere. My apologies for not making a note of who she is and where her lovely artwork could be found. If anybody has any idea whose site I might have looked at please let me know so I can credit it. I think she had decorated am F and an L.

Anyway, I used a standard serif font for the h, stroked it in black, filled it with nothing then converted to outlines so I could start using the Pen tool to start shaping sections of the letter, etc. The patterns within the letter itself are designs that were dropped onto a combination of the Brushes and Swatches palette. There was some tweaking (ha ha – could there not have been – it got fiddly at times!) and the Clipping Mask got called in to play a few times as well. It’s a nice, relaxing wet Sunday afternoon project to get into.

However, once the brushes are set up you have them forever and can use again and again on other projects.

So, for now, here is my letter H and I’ll finish the How To on making the different types of brushes and swatches and post that soon.

Me and the tree

Hello there!

This is a blog of many things and reflects my interests as they come and go. You’ll find Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials along with embroidery, sewing, crochet, baking and papercutting. It’s fairly eclectic.

The tree has long roots in Ireland in a garden full of flowers with lots of birds, bees and butterflies.

I live in a very happy home with Mr Tree and our two kitty girls, Gracie and Jess.